I like something a writer (I forget who) once said, that to learn to write you should try to copy your favourite writer. You'll fail, of course, but your failure will be your own originality coming through.
So though you may base a story structure on something clever someone else did, it's the merest starting point. You'll write a quite different book.
Sometimes I find I have purloined a few words here and there that I didn't even realise I'd done. Then it becomes an allusion.
Plagiarism is just blatant theft, that's all there is to it.
But art is something else and it may resemble collage, for instance W G Sebald:
Quote:
He stole ruthlessly, from Kafka, Wittgenstein and countless others, to the extent that some of his books are nearly collages. Like Montaigne, he seemed not to count his borrowings but to weigh them. He put people he knew into his work and infuriated many of them, causing, in just one instance, his mother to lose her friends. More problematically, Sebald pushed past the moral dangers inherent in a German writer appropriating Jewish stories.
To create the character of Jacques Austerlitz, for example, the architectural historian in “Austerlitz” who finds out later in life that he is Jewish, having been delivered to London at age 4 by Kindertransport, Sebald took many key details from a memoir titled “Rosa’s Child,” by Susi Bechhöfer.
She responded by publishing an essay titled “Stripped of My Tragic Past by a Best-Selling Author.” She wanted Sebald to acknowledge his debt to her book. It’s unclear if he would have done so, but he died before the issue could be settled.
Angier, the daughter of Jewish refugees who fled Nazism, walks a tightrope on Sebald’s appropriations. He was, she writes, “the German writer who most deeply took on the burden of German responsibility for the Holocaust.” He transmuted his borrowings into lasting art.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/b...le-angier.html
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